Tag: administration

Environment Grouping

One of the main ‘complaints’ that Power Platform administrators have is around how policies are applied to environments. Within Azure, it’s possible to set up security policies and apply them in bulk, or group together components under a single set of policies. However when it comes to Power Platform, this has not been possible – each environment has needed to be configured on its own.

I’m not talking here about DLP policies, as these are set up and then relevant environments selected/deselected as needed. I’m talking about things like setting Canvas App sharing limits, welcoming new makers, and other items.

Well, Microsoft has now made this possible to do – though the current first iteration (now in Public Preview) only has a few options within it, I’m quite certain that many more items will be coming down the line to fall under the new Environment Grouping feature.

At the moment, there are 6 options available for Power Platform administrators to be able to set and configure. Note that you do need to have the M365 security roles for either Global Tenant Administrator or Power Platform Administrator to be able to access and carry this out.

To be clear, Environment Grouping is a feature of Managed Environments. I’m not going to go into the debate about whether you should or shouldn’t adopt Managed Environments (at least not here – I may be speaking about it publicly later on this year), but you do need to have these in order to use this functionality. More specifically, you will ONLY be able to add environments that are set as ‘Managed’ to Environment Groups (though they don’t have to have Dataverse in play):

So, what exactly is the purpose of Environment Grouping? Well, it’s to minimise the amount of time that Power Platform administrators need to spend in setting up & applying policies.

Think of the users within your organsiation. You’re going to have different personas, such as developers, testers, end users, etc.

You’re also likely (especially in larger organisation) to have different business units & functions requiring different items. For example, you may lock down access to social media, but Marketing and Recruitment may indeed need access to social media to be able to carry out their jobs.

With these personas in mind, you can then start to look into building out different rule groupings, which will apply to all environments that are included under the Environment Group. It’s somewhat similar to the way in which DLP policies work – you create a DLP policy, and then everything that comes under the DLP policy gets the DLP policy setting.

There are many ways to manage pockets of environments within your tenant using environment groups. For example, global organisations can create an environment group for all environments in each geographic region to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. You can also organise environment groups by department or other criteria.

One of the other features around Environment Groups is the ability to use Environment Routing. I’ve talked about this previously when the feature was first released (Developer Environment Routing!) – Environment Groups now takes this to the next level, by being able to automatically set the Environment Group that new developer environments will fall under (so therefore policies will be automatically applied). Important to note here that all developer environments created through this WILL be set as ‘Managed’.

More information on the new capabilities can of course be found on Microsoft Learn, at https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/environment-groups.

I think that this is a great new feature to have in place for Power Platform administrators, and look forward to seeing new functionality rolled out within this to enable organisations in a better way. Being able to cut down on administration/governance time, whilst being able to be more effective is, in my view, a win-win for ALL of us, and I can’t wait to see how it will develop over time.

So, my question to you is how would YOU look to use such functionality? What features might you like to appear within Environment Grouping to enable you and your organisation? Drop a comment below – I’d love to hear!

Developer environments – new capabilities to create for users

Developer environments are awesome. There – I’ve said it for the record. Formerly known as the ‘Community Plan’, developer environments are there for users to be able to play with things, get up to speed, test out new functionality, etc. They’re free to use – even with premium capabilities & connectors, users do not need premium licensing in place (caveat – if it’s enabled as a Managed Environment, it will require premium licensing).

Originally, users were only able to create a single developer environment. However, earlier on this year Microsoft lifted this restriction – users are now able to create up to THREE developer environments for their own usage (which makes it even easier now for users to get used to ALM capabilities, and try it out for themselves).

Now, the ability for users to create developer environments is controlled at the tenant level, and it’s either On or Off. It requires a global tenant admin to modify this setting, but it’s not possible to say ‘User Group A will not be able to create developer environments for themselves, but User Group B will be able to’.

Organisations have differing viewpoints on whether they should allow their users the ability to create developer environments or not. I know this well, as usually I’m part of conversations with them when they’re debating this.

One of the main challenges that comes when organisations don’t allow users to create their own developer environments has been that historically, it’s not been possible for someone else to create the environment on their behalf. If we think of ‘traditional IT’, if we’re not able to do something due to locked down permissions, we can usually ask ‘IT’ to do it for us, and grant us access. This has not been the case with developer environments though – well, not until recently.

Something that I do from time to time is chat with the Microsoft Product Engineering groups, to provide feedback to (try to!) help iterate products forward and better. One of the conversations I had in the summer was with the team responsible for developer environments. I was able to share experiences & conversations that I had been having with large scale enterprise organisations, and (very politely!) asked if they could look to open up the ability to do something around this.

Around a month ago or so, the first iteration of this dropped – in the Power Platform Admin Centre interface, it was now possible to specify the user for whom an environment was to be created!

This was an amazing start to things, and definitely would start unblocking Power Platform IT teams to enable their users, in circumstances where their organisations had decided to turn off the ability for users to create their own developer environments.

However, this still required the need to do it manually. Unless looking into an RPA process (which, let’s face it, would be clunky & undesirable), it meant that someone with appropriate privileges would need to go & actually create the environment, and associate it to the user.

However, this has now taken another MASSIVE step forward – I’m delighted to announce that this capability has been implemented in the Power Platform CLI, and is live RIGHT NOW (you’ll need to upgrade to the latest version – it’s present in 1.28.3 onwards).

So, with this in place, it’s now possible to use PowerShell commands to be able to create developer environments on behalf of users, and assign it to them. Organisations usually already have PowerShell scripts to handle new joiners, and will therefore be able to integrate this capability into these, to automatically set up developer environments for users. Alternatively, existing users could look to raise internal requests, and have them automated through the use of PowerShell (along with appropriate approval processes, of course!).

So this is really nice to see. However, I think it can still go one step further (at least!), and am trying to use my connection network to raise with the right people.

See, we have the Power Platform for Admins connector within Power Platform already. One of the functions available in this is to be able to create Power Platform environments:

However, if we look at the action (& the advanced settings within this action), there’s no ability to set this:

Interestingly enough, the API version listed by default is actually several years old. By doing some digging around, I can see that there are multiple later API versions, so I’m not sure why it’s using an older one by default:

What would be really amazing is to have these capabilities surfaced directly within Power Platform, using this connector. Then we could look to have everything handled directly within Power Platform. Given that the CoE toolkit already includes an Environment Request feature, I would see this as building on top & enabling it even further. Obviously organisations wouldn’t need the CoE toolkit itself, as they could look to build out something custom to handle this.

What are your thoughts on this – how do you see these features enabling your organisation? If your organisation HAS locked down the ability for users to provision developer environments, are you able to share some insights as to why? I’d love to hear more – drop a comment below!¬

Default Environment – How to handle?

As we’re all aware, the default (Power Platform) environment in any Azure tenant is a very ‘interesting’ thing to have. It’s there by default when an Azure tenant is created, all users within the Azure tenant automatically have access to it, we’re not able to restrict users from being in it, etc etc.

Though it’s able to be backed up, it’s not able to be restored over itself, there’s no SLA/support available on it….the list goes on & on…!

Many of us have come up against issues caused by people using the default environment whilst not knowing about challenges involving it, which usually results in pulling out our hair, banging our head against the wall, and other like-minded productive approaches.

However, it is the first place that users, being new to Power Platform, land up, and instinctively they’ll start building applications, automations etc within it (though usually without using solutions as a container for the development of items). So to date, there’s not really anything that’s been able to be done around this, apart from monitoring users & chasing them after the fact.

Now, we’re all about enabling our users in the right way, helping educate & support them. Telling them a big NO doesn’t help, and can even be an initial blocker to having people start playing around & building technological solutions.

So how can we go about enabling our users, but also having the appropriate level of governance over the top? Well, there are several steps that I think we can take, which will help us with these. Now, not all of these are yet in place, though they have been talked about publicly. So let’s go take a look at them

  1. The first step, in my mind, is to start off with enabling the default environment as a managed environment (yes, this can ACTUALLY be done!). Managed environments have many different properties associated with them, but the one of most interest (for this at least) is the requirement to have a premium license in place.

All users within an organisation should by default have an M365 license SKU against them (usually this would be an E3 or E5). Users with these can immediately use the seeded Power Platform capabilities within them to create Power Platform collateral (using standard connector capabilities). However, with the default environment being managed, they will NOT be able to access it!

Note: For the moment, I’m leaving out users who have premium Power Platform licenses – this is deliberate

  1. Environment routing. Announced recently is the environment routing capabilities. This will enable users to be automatically routed to an appropriate environment, based on various conditions that can be set. With this, we could create appropriate business unit ‘sandboxes’, and we could route users to these. The user experience would be that when logging in, they would automatically then go to the right environment, rather than trying to work out which environment they should actually go to. This will save on confusion, and be a good user experience (in my opinion).
  1. Just-In-Time (JIT) Environment Creation. One of the items mentioned by Charles Lamanna at the European Power Platform Conference 2023 in Dublin is a new capability that’s coming in soon (I hope!). From the sound of it, this will give the ability to automatically create a new environment for users who do not already have one.

This sounds really cool. With the recent advent of Development Environments (& the ability for all users to have multiples of these), this could work REALLY well with the environment routing capability mentioned above. When a user would log in for the first time, it could look to see if they have a developer environment – if yes, then route them to it. But if the user didn’t, then to automatically spin up & create a new developer environment, and route them to it.

Now there are some caveats with this approach, leaving aside that some of the functionality isn’t GA yet.

It would mean that organisations would need to be alright with changing the default environment to become a managed environment. Obviously, risk assessments would need to be carried out with this, and non-premium solutions migrated elsewhere.

It’s also important to call out that organisations which have a CDS 1.0 implementation (ie before Power Platform became GA etc) will only have the ability to upgrade default to managed. They are not able to downgrade back to an unmanaged default environment, given limitations of the original CDS implementation (I’ve heard some truly HORRIFIC stories around this, so be careful!)

The above, however, is just the start of things. There are many other concepts to keep in mind, such as Landing Zones, Policies, etc. I’m going to be looking to cover these in upcoming posts, so keep an eye out for them!

Developer Environment Deletion!

Strong title for a blog post, right? Well, I did want to catch your attention! So what exactly are we talking about here?

For the last few years, it’s been possible for users to sign up for a ‘Developer’ plan, which gives them a full capability Power Platform environment for free (though with some limitations to them). This used to be be called the ‘Community’ plan, and is an amazing resource for everyone, whether they’re a professional or citizen developer, to have their own personal ‘sandpit’ to play in, and try things out.

Let’s wind back a few months in time now – earlier this year, Microsoft announced that users would be able to create THREE of these Developer environments, rather than having just a single one! This was mind blowing news, and something that has been extremely welcomed. If you’re wanting to see more on the announcement, Phil Topness has a great video on it at Dataverse Environments For Everyone – New Developer Plan – Power CAT Live – YouTube.

Incidentally, I’m curious as to how much storage space Microsoft has in the background to handle these. After all, each environment takes up a minimum of 1GB of space (& can grow to 2 GB). That means that each user could have 6GB of storage being used….which when multiplied, gives a VERY large number!

Microsoft has now announced that these developer environments, however, need to be utilisied. Ie if they’ve been created, but aren’t being used, Microsoft is going to delete them! Now, from a certain perspective, this is actually quite good – after all, there are all of the storage considerations for environments that have been created, but not being used. However from a different perspective, this could be a problem. What about if you’re doing something occasionally in an environment, but not too often? What about if you decide to go on a ‘Round the World’ cruise for several months?

So let’s look at the definition for this. Microsoft states that an environment is considered to be inactive when it hasn’t been used for 90 days. At that point in time, it is disabled, and the administrator or environment owner is notified. If there is no action taken within the next 30 days, then the developer environment is automatically deleted.

Now, how does Microsoft define ‘Activity’? It goes something like this:

  • User activity: Launch an app, execute a flow (whether automatic or not), chat with a Power Virtual Agents bot
  • Maker activity: Create, read, update, or delete an app, flow (desktop and cloud flows), Power Virtual Agents bot, custom connector
  • Admin activity: Environment operations such as copy, delete, back up, recover, reset

The above is all user driven – ie a user needs to interact with something within the environment. However, it’s also important to note how automation is viewed:

  • Activity includes automated behaviors such as scheduled flow runs. For example, if there’s no user, maker, or admin activity in an environment, but it contains a cloud flow that runs daily, then the environment is considered active.

It’s also important to note that at this point in time, the above only applies to Developer environments. Other types of environment (Production, Sandbox etc) don’t have any auto-deletion policies called out for them – well, at least not yet (if something does pop up around these, I’ll definitely look to talk about them too!).

So to answer our question above about what happens with a (developer) environment that is only being used infrequently – the way to stop it being auto-deleted is to put some automation in place. This doesn’t need to be lightweight – it can be something simple & easy, just to ensure that the environment registers activity happening within it.

In my view, it would be nice to have some granularity & control over this as well – allowing organisations to set their own deletion policies. We have this in place for things like audit log retention – it would be nice to have have it in here too.

Updates to the Power Platform Admin Center

There’s a saying amongst seasoned IT professionals who deal with Microsoft software. It goes something like this – ‘Why make do with one admin centre, when you could just have MULTIPLE admin centres to carry out functions!’.

It’s a bit of a tongue-in-check response to the numerous different admin centres that Microsoft technology seems to have. Now, I/we totally understand that over time, different (standalone) products have come together to co-exist, but their administration centres still differ.

Over time, Microsoft has been applying efforts to make them work better together, but it can still sometimes be quite frustrating not to know exactly where to go to in order to carry out specific function/s, or not to be able to see capabilities holistically overall in a single place.

So for example, we have:

  • Microsoft 365 Admin Centre
  • Power BI Admin Centre
  • Power Platform Admin Centre (which, for Dynamics 365 deployments, still leads users to the Classic Advanced Settings for some of the functionality…)
  • etc….

Now when it comes to Power Platform related items, admins would usually go to the Power Platform Admin Centre (which though it has a URL of admin.powerplatform.com, this auto-resolves to admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com – I have no idea why this is, given that no other admin centre seems to have this structure in place….another mystery…)

From here, we’d be presented with a list of environments, similar to the screenshot below:

The menu on the left hand side gave us a few of the different admin centres that we’re able to switch to. Alternatively, we could expand the overall menu to show us more capabilities, including other apps that we may wish to access:

So this is what we’ve been used to for the last few years. Essentially, information in different areas, and we’d need to go to each admin centre to find out what’s happening. So for example, if a Power Platform Admin user wanted to see any health advisories, they’d need to go to the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre to view the Service Health area there.

Not anymore! As part of the focus on unifying information across admin centres, Microsoft has now updated the functionality for this!

Now, with the new functionality, there’s a Home screen. On this, information is able to be presented to users, as well as applying one of several themes to the interface, such as a rainbow:

Now, in terms of information available to users, these are presented as ‘cards’. Within each card, information is shown, based on the card type:

At the moment, there are three cards to choose from:

Service Health

This section outlines any service health issues, such as outages or advisory information that users should be aware of. Clicking through it will bring users to the Service Health section of the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre:

From here, users can choose to switch across to other categories, such as Incidents, History & Reported Issues.

It’s (at least) one less click from the previous method, and I’m quite liking this. In my mind, it’s about making the information as accessible as possible (leaving aside that I think that Power Platform specific alerts should actually show within the Power Platform Admin Centre…)

Message Center

The second section is the Message Center. Here we’re able to see specific messages (yes, I know I have a LOT of messages sitting here!), and clicking on them will bring up the corresponding information directly within the same interface (which again, I’m really liking). So for example:

Nicely for messages, we also have options to filter the types of services that we want to see here. This, in my mind, is quite important, as we wouldn’t want Power Platform admins to be overwhelmed by messages that have absolutely no (usual) interest for them:

We also have the ability to specify which email notifications we want to be receiving. Again, we may be interested in some non-Power Platform notifications, but not want to see them directly within the Power Platform Admin Centre. Instead, we can specify to receive these via email – another nice touch!

Documentation

Finally, we have linked out to various Power Platform (& Dynamics 365) related resources on the Microsoft website. These are all static (ie they’re provided by Microsoft), but hopefully in the future admins will have the capability to add custom links to other resources as well.

What is nice about the documentation section though is that it’s got linked to the various Community forums. Microsoft has recently started to promote these within the products, and they can be a very helpful resource at times to be able to use!

There are also links to the Microsoft Centre of Excellence toolkit, which is a great resource that organisations should look to implement.

All in all, I think that this is a VERY good start to things. I’m hopeful that with Microsoft implementing this ‘home screen’ functionality with the ability to add cards to it, there will be additional cards that are released, bringing more information & functionality into the interface. I’m also hopeful that Microsoft will allow admins to add custom functionality here as well.

It’s a good first step – now let’s wait to see how this functionality iterates over time, and hopefully enables admin users in better ways!

Workaround for sharing Canvas Apps

Don’t you find it absolutely frustrating when there’s a canvas app that you want to get access to, or give other users access to, but can’t see it? It’s REALLY annoying, but it’s sort of the way that Microsoft has designed the platform (at least at this point in time).

See, when a user creates a canvas app, only the creator is able to see & launch it. If other users want to get access to it, the creator needs to share it. This can be done by sharing the app directly with another user, or by sharing it with an AAD Security Group (which is sort of best practise).

Now, of course there’s the Microsoft Power Platform Centre of Excellence solution, which includes a very handy app to assign permissions for canvas apps. After all, if a user is on holiday, sick leave, or has left the company, there needs to be some way of assigning permissions for other users to gain access to it. It’s really helpful, but of course needs the CoE solution installed.

Let’s think of another scenario. What about if we have some canvas apps as part of a solution, that’s deployed through (proper) ALM – such as using Azure DevOps with automated pipelines. Best practise for this is to use service principals (ie non-interactive user logins). This is great, but then the canvas app/s will be owned by this user. So without the use of the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app, we’re sort of stuck, as we can’t gain access to the app.

Or can we…..?

So this is a scenario that I’ve been dealing with recently, and I’ve found a really cool workaround that doesn’t need the CoE ‘Set App Permissions’ canvas app to be able to handle the situation.

The example below (amusingly, in my opinion) is actually using the Microsoft CoE solution as an example, but this works with any canvas apps that are held within a solution (against, this heavily supports using solutions for ALL development items!).

So, this is what the actual installed apps look like in this environment:

As we can see, there are a lot of them! But what happens if I’m logged in as my regular user? What do I see if I go to the list of apps? Well, I’ll see the following:

Now, as we can see, I’m able to see the model-driven app (as these aren’t hidden at all). But I’m not able to see ANY of the canvas app! So how can I get access to it, or share it with other users?

Well, if I take a look at the solution itself, I can see the following when browsing to the list of apps (I’m really loving the new Solution Explorer layout, I’ll freely admit!):

I can try to play the canvas app (in this case, the ‘Set App Permissions’ app) directly from the solution. But when I try to do this, I’ll get the following error message:

Now, this is of course happening because I’m not the owner of the app, & the app hasn’t been shared with me at all. So really I was expecting this error to happen.

However, if I take a look at the menu options displayed for me, I can see that the ‘Share’ option isn’t greyed out. I wonder what happens if I click it…

Now this is EXCITING! When clicking the ‘Share’ option on the menu, I’m given the regular sharing screen, where I’m able to set app permissions. So it looks like I’m able to do something here. OK – let’s go ahead & try to share the app with my own user:

So I’ve looked up my own user, and then clicked ‘Share’. This is what happens next…

Exciting moment – will this work?

Waiting with bated breath, and then…

It’s worked! The app sharing has been successful with my user.

Note: The example that I’m using here is with my own user account. However it doesn’t need to be – I can select any user account or AAD Security Group, and share accordingly.

Going to my list of apps, I can now see that the app is showing up for me:

Clicking the app to launch it presents me with the permissions dialogue, and having confirmed permissions, then launches it properly:

So this is indeed a way in which it’s possible to share canvas apps with users and/or AAD security groups, even when a user isn’t the owner of the canvas app.

It is important to note that the user carrying this out does need to have one of the following permissions in the environment:

  • System Customiser
  • System Administrator

Without having one of these roles, it’s not going to be possible to carry out the above (mostly because it’s not possible to see solutions & dig down into them).

This is a handy little trick that hopefully will help clear up one of the headaches when trying to share canvas apps! Of course it’s possible to use the Microsoft CoE tool to set app permissions, but if a customer doesn’t have it installed, then this would be another way to approach things.

Have you ever had this issue? How did you go about solving it? I’d love to hear – please drop a comment below…